Brother Tom was my mom’s pastor in Missouri. Once when I was on vacation from my church in Texas, Tom asked me to preach on a Sunday night at FBC Knob Noster Missouri. The sound technician asked me, “What is the title of your sermon?” I’m not sure I thought much about titles back then, but I said, “I’m preaching on sin. And I am against it.” If one preaches about sin, one should definitely be against it.
If someone in Colosse had asked Paul, “What is your message?” he would surely have responded, “Jesus.” Earlier in the letter he rises to majestic heights as he describes Jesus as the “image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. . . the head of the body, the church. In him all of God’s fullness dwells.” Christ in the believers is the hope of glory. Paul concludes, “We proclaim him.”
Why did Paul preach about Jesus? As a former Pharisee, he could have plumbed the depths of the rules in the Old Testament. On a road to Damascus, though, Jesus himself arrested Paul with a light and a voice. Ever after that experience, Jesus was Paul’s grand obsession. He was all Paul ever wanted to think about and talk about. Paul preached Jesus because he wanted to present every listener fully mature in Christ.
Bart Millard wrote a song to himself called, “Dear younger me . . .” What would I say to myself as I was beginning to respond to God’s call? Forty years later, I am still against sin. I would tell myself what I told a group of fellow pastors last Sunday morning, “Give them Jesus. The world has never needed him more.” In Jesus and for Jesus we can grow up. “To be an acorn is to have a taste for becoming an Oak Tree,” wrote Thomas Merton. Let’s give ourselves to maturation in Christ. I’ll work hard to this end. Want to join me?
